Interstellar won’t be released until November, but that’s not stopping Christopher Nolan from sharing his unique view of the future with the movie-going public. In an editorial published Monday, the director had some surprisingly optimistic predictions about the future of film and the theater-going experience. So stop writing that obit, self-serious cinephiles: the only thing that might be extinct here is Age of Extinction itself.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Nolan agrees with a prediction from Tarantino that movie theaters will soon become just “television in public,” saying
As streams of data, movies would be thrown in with other endeavors under the reductive term “content,”[…]”Content” can be ported across phones, watches, gas-station pumps or any other screen, and the idea would be that movie theaters should acknowledge their place as just another of these “platforms,” albeit with bigger screens and cupholders.
Although the content catch-all makes film more accessible, Nolan warns it also “pretends to elevate the creative, but actually trivializes differences of form that have been important to creators and audiences alike–” the easy availability of an art form doesn’t necessarily enhance it, since “instant reactivity always favors the familiar.” That’s not an environment that fosters films like Memento, it’s a popularity contest that would make a franchise like Transformers exponentially more successful. But according to Nolan, the distant future will be better than Bay:
This bleak future is the direction the industry is pointed in, but even if it arrives it will not last. Once movies can no longer be defined by technology, you unmask powerful fundamentals—the timelessness, the otherworldliness, the shared experience of these narratives. We moan about intrusive moviegoers, but most of us feel a pang of disappointment when we find ourselves in an empty theater […] The audience experience is distinct from home entertainment, but not so much that people seek it out for its own sake. The experience must distinguish itself in other ways. And it will. The public will lay down their money to those studios, theaters and filmmakers who value the theatrical experience and create a new distinction from home entertainment that will enthrall—just as movies fought back with widescreen and multitrack sound when television first nipped at its heels.
Nolan’s vision is appealing to me, if only because it’s reassuring to hear from an established director who doesn’t have a “damn-those-millennials” fear of drastic changes to his craft, and is level-headed enough to see how an industry might need to get “worse” before it can reach new levels of creativity.
What do you guys think? Will film experience a bleak near-future but an eventual renaissance? Are you just too stoked for Interstellar to focus on anything else right now?
(via blastr, image via charlieanders2 on Flickr)
- Seriously, though, how beautiful is this trailer?
- The Dark Knight as an ’80s film just makes us miss Dawson’s Creek
- Christian Bale had to wear Val Kilmer’s suit to an audition
Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?
